Global Woman

Global Woman
Introduction

Women are on the move as never before. Their left behind in native countries, suffer great emotional trauma, do not do well in school, and even attempt suicide.
In both rich and poor countries, fewer families can rely solely on a male breadwinner. In the US, the earning power of males has declined since 1970, and women are the sole or coequal earners in more than ½ of American families (1).
Many emigrant workers are women of color, and subject to racial discrimination, and their work is mostly ‘indoor’, nannies, maids and more so sex workers. Servants are no longer displayed, as they used to be, in a uniform, with white caps and aprons.
Wife’s traditional work in the rich countries has been taken over by global transfer of servants. In an earlier age imperialists extracted resources from the poor countries, now they extract cheap labor.
There are historic precedents. In ancient times, defeated nations had their women and men made slaves. Africans were brought to Americas. Irish women worked in English homes.
There has been a feminization of emigration (2). From 1950 to 1970, men predominated. By 1990 Algerian and Moroccan women constituted 40% of the immigrants to France (3). Half of the world’s 120 million immigrant are women.
In 1990s, over half of Filipino and 84% of Sri Lankan immigrants to the Middle East were women (4).
Out of the regional/cross regional flows four stand out-from the far East to Mid-East, from the former soviet Union to Western Europe, from the south to north in Americas,, and from Africa to various countries in Europe.
In the US, Latinos have replaced the African American women, Asians have replaced the Irish women in England and Algerian girls …the rural French girls, East Germans into West Germany.
They send home nearly half of what they make.
Over the last 30 years, the rich countries have grown much richer, the poor countries, much poorer.
IMF/WB loans are disastrous for the poor, as they force the countries to cut expenses on education, health and welfare.
The US, unlike the other developed countries, does not offer public child care for working mothers. State tax revolts in 1980sreduced the number of public library hours and after school programs.
As US women went to work, their men did not take up the slack in house work (9).
With divorce, they often abdicate their child care responsibility to ex wives.
An alarming number of women and girls are sold into bondage. In Thailand, a country of 60 million, half to one million women are prostitutes, and one out of every twenty is enslaved (10).
Relative poverty does play a role, but increasingly migrant women come from the better educated class. They resist pressure to stay home and accept their lot.
Globalization of child care brings the independent middle class women pf the first world and ambitious women of the third world together. In this perspective and in a particularly intimate way, rich countries are dependent on the poor ones.

Love and Gold:
Article 9, of the UN declaration on the right of the child (1959) “ should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding…not to be separated from his or her parents against their will…” has had to be sacrificed at the altar of globalization.
Out of the 792,000 legal household workers in the US, 40% were born abroad. Of the Filipino immigrants, 70% are women. There is importation of care and love from the poor countries to the rich ones.
The scope and speed of women’s migration from the south to the north is unprecedented.
In 1960, nations of the north were twenty times richer, by 1980, they were 46 times so. According to UNDP (united Nations Development Program) study, 60 countries were worse off in 1999, than they were in 1980 (2). William Greider the 500 largest MNCs (168 in Europe, 157 in the US and 119 in Japan) are responsible for the growing inequality, and in the last 20 years increased their sales sevenfold (3).
Middle class of the third world earns less than the poor of the West. Immigrants to the US and Italy from Philippines earned $ 176.00 a month as teachers, nurses and clerical/administrative staff. As nannies and maids they made $ 200.00 in Singapore, $ 410.00 in Hong Kong, $ 700.00 in Italy and $ 1,400.00 in LA.
As the income gap increases , the globe becomes more integrated in capital. Culture, consumer tastes.
For men and women, migration has become a private solution to a public problem.
Most migrations take place through personal contact. A great many female workers go to domestic jobs (7) taking over from housewives. In 1950, 15 % of mothers of young children worked outside their homes, now 65% do. 72 % of all American women work.
A good number of immigrant women are single mothers. 24% of households in the US, 19% in Africa, 18% in Latin America, and 13% in Asia are headed by women. In addition, there are the ‘shadow’ single mothers, married to alcoholics and gamblers.
More migrant women than men stay on in foreign countries.
In the past, imperialism was physical possession., now it is emotional imperialism, which does not come out of the barrel of a gun, but through the market.

The Nanny dilemma:
Behind every great woman there is a good nanny. There are nearly 400,000 children under 13 in NY, both of whose parents work. There are fewer than 100,000places in after school and day-care programs.
Many nannies wonder why their employers bothered to have children at all.
Nanny’s job is unstable. Children sometimes go to school at age 2, and number of jobs dwindles.

Commodification of Domestic Labor:
There is much to distinguish domestic labor from other undesirable jobs like flipping hamburgers or garbage collection. Domestic labor is deeply embedded in status relationships.
Racial stereotypes play a role, both in the abuse of domestic workers, in selection of migrant workers over local citizens in the first place. Agencies and employers tend to express preferences for specific nationalities.

America’s dirty work
Tucked behind the manicured laws and closed doors are some of the most vulnerable people in the USA: abused migrant workers, who are sometimes the victims of slavery and human trafficking.
Theoretically the domestic worker visa program provides a window of opportunity for people in LDCs to come to the USA, but it does not provide adequate protection to the workers.

Selling Sex for Visa
Many Dominican sex workers of Sosua make a distinction between marriage por amor and marriage por residencia.
Poor single mothers are using sex work in a tourist town, not just as a survival but an advancement strategy, the key aims being marriage and migration. It does not operate through pimps.
Sex tourism is fueled by the fantasies of white men exoticizing about dark native bodies.
Sex workers also pretend to be in live with their customers.

Clashing Dreams.
About a quarter of all men, and 40% of all women who enter the US are marriage migrants (5). Mail-order brides constitute at most 4% of all marriage migrants. Migrant men are increasingly seeking wives in the countries of their origin (12). About 2/3 are of the same ethnicity. Highly educated women marry low wage workers of their country of origin, in the USA.
Marriage Gradient-women tend to marry men older, better educated and higher earning (18). Men marry down economically and socially, women marry up.

Global Cities and survival circuits
Pornography of globalization:
Analysts define globalization as hyper-mobility, international communications and the neutralization of distance and place-all realms with in which the only type of worker who matters is the highly educated professional, thus privileging global transmission to the material infrastructure which makes it possible, and the new TNC culture to other jobs over which it rests.
There are significant links between globalization and women’s migration, whether voluntary or forced, for jobs that used to be part of Western women’s domestic role. The questions are whether globalization has enabled formerly national or regional processes to go global and whether has produced a new kind of migration, with new conditions and dynamics of its own.
Migrating women participate in two sets of dynamic configurations. One is the global city and the other ( is) the survival circuits that have evolved in response to the deepening misery if the South. (1).
Global cities concentrate some of the key functions global economy and resources. They have sharply increased the demand for highly paid professionals. The life style of the professionals generates a demand for low paid service workers-nannies, clerical workers and waitresses in expensive restaurants.
Third world countries build survival circuits on the backs of the women, who send remittances back home. Entrepreneurs, who have seen opportunities vanish as global firms overwhelm them, see profit in trafficking of women, as do long time criminals.
Global cities produce a strong demand for workers, mobilization of women produces an ever expanding supply of migrants. Technological infra-structures enables traffickers to play on the global stage.(2).
Globalization involves territorial centralization of top level management , control operations and most advanced services. We have to include secretaries and maids and office cleaners, (the production process) in globalization.
Women in the global city
Unlike its historic context, high demand does not translate into high wages and benefits, as the new labor supply is seemingly inexhaustible.
Global cities have also seen a trend towards in formalization of a range of activities, by locating commercial/manufacturing operations in residential areas and by assigning industrial homework to employees. This is a low cost equivalent to financial deregulation at the top of the system.
For women the transformation does offer the potential, however limited, of autonomy and empowerment. As migrant women overwhelmingly come from male-centered cultures. Men lose ground and women emerge as public actors.
Immigrant women tend to be active in institutions of public and private assistance and ethnic/immigrant community.
On the other hand these women make up an invisible and disempowered class of workers that keeps them from emerging as the strong proletariat class that followed the earlier forms of economic organization. But it does alter the gender hierarchy.
Most analysts of post-industrial society emphasize the demand for highly educated professionals and ignore demand for low wage, workers with little education (7).
Ongoing and indeed growing demand of immigrant workers is explained by consolidation of advanced services and corporate headquarters in the urban economic core, and downgrading of manufacturing services due to cheap imports, and the modest profit in manufacturing as compared to tele-com, finance. The third factor is informalization, a notable example being the sweat shops. So informalization and sweat shops are not just third world imports or anachronistic hold overs.
In NY and other large cities, 30 to 50% are low wage workers.
Global markets have a top and a bottom. The bottom is supplied by an expanding network of legal (Kelly Services and smaller staffing organizations, EF Au Pair program) and illegal traffickers (11). At the top are Swiss multinational Adecco and others.
Producing Global supply of Caretakers
Migrations organized by third parties, governments and illegal traffickers. One such circuit consists of trafficking for the sex industry. Unemployment is on the rise in much of the LDCs, faced with MNC competition, small and mid-sized enterprises are closing down, government debt is rising, mainly due to coercion of MNCs and Western governments to accept irrational projects, purchase arms and ammunition and ignore nation building requirements and accept IMF/WB dicta, cut back on social spending and hugely swelling the ranks of the decrepit (during the East Asian economic crisis Malaysia ignored IMF advice and its economy survived the best). Economies are consequently stagnant (14) mainly due to ‘defense’ spending and servicing of the debt. Prostitution and migrant labor are increasingly popular ways to make a living. This can be termed partial feminization of survival.
Debt and debt servicing has been endemic in the Less Developed Countries (LDCs, I prefer this term to Developing countries. That is a cruel joke).
Debt has detrimental effect on government programs, notably education and health care. Austerity and adjustment programs ordained by IMF/WB produce unemployment, which adversely affects women even more (16) by adding pressure on them to ensure household survival. Many women turn to informal work, emigration and prostitution (17).
Most of the countries that fell into debt in the 1980s have gone deeper into debt. In the 1990s, a new set of countries joined the first group. IMF/WB responded with their usual Structural adjustment programs (SAP) and loans, tied to economic policy ‘reform’, and not to particular projects, ostensibly to make the countries ‘competitive’.
They did not become competitive, but went deeper into debt and developed acute social problems, with 50 now categorized as ‘highly indebted poor countries’. A growing number of middle-income counties typified by Argentina, which in December 2001 defaulted on @ 140.000 billion debt.
Given the structure and servicing of debts, these countries are unlikely ever to be able to pay their debts.
It is widely known that the debt-ridden countries have, between 199-82 and 1998, have paid four times their original debts, and at the same time their debt has increased four times (18). 33 of the 41 ‘highly indebted poor countries’ paid $ 3.00 in debt service (interest) for every 1.00 dollar they received in loans. Most of these countries pay more than 50% of their government revenues towards debt service.
The ratio of debt to GNP exceeds sustainable limits. Such ratios are especially high in Africa at 123%, with 42 % in Latin America and 28% in Asia (19). SAPs have had the effect of intensifying debt dependence.
Alternative survival:
There is growing salience of the trafficking of women as a profit making option, and the increasing importance of emigrant’s remittance to economic survival.
Trafficking, forced transportation of people is a violation of human rights, but because it has become critical to economic globalization, is given only lip service in the form of international treaties, charters, UN resolutions, bodies and commissions and NGOs (20-21).
Trafficking of women for the sex industry is highly profitable, except to the workers. Per UN estimates 4 million people were trafficked in 1998, producing a profit
of $ 7 billion (22).In Poland for every woman delivered, the trafficker receives $ 700.00. Ukrainian and Russian women are equivalent to $ 500.00 and $ 1000.00 respectively, and are expected to ‘service’ , on the average 15 clients a day, and make $ 215,000.000 per month (23)
In recent years, several million girls and women have been trafficked from and within Asia and the former Soviet Union, linked to growing poverty and unemployment in the regions. Unemployment hit 70% among women in Armenia, Russia, and Croatia (80% in Ukraine), after implementation of market policies.
Per a UN report criminal gangs (with connivance of receiving countries’ immigrant authorities) generated $ 3.5 billion in revenues in 1990.
Organized crime groups are creating strategic international alliances, which facilitate transport distribution and ‘false’ documents (25-26).
Such women have little recourse to law, and are subject to abuse.
Many countries (except Netherlands and Switzerland. Japan offers ‘entertainment visas) forbid foreign women to work as prostitutes. Nevertheless, 75% of prostitutes in Germany and 80% in Milan, Italy, are foreign women.
On arrival in the ‘host’ country, the confinement of these women is extreme, akin to slavery, and abuse like rape, other sexual violence and physical punishment routine. Their wages are often withheld, and they are forbidden to protect themselves against AIDS. They are denied health care.
If they go to the police, they are arrested, and face violations of their sex in jails.
Tourism has grown sharply in the last decade (declined considerably since the current melt down), it was adopted as a strategy for development by many countries, with sex trade as its core (Personal observation ;in Bangkok, Thailand, Karachi, Pakistan and Bombay India, if you stay in a hotel, you get frequent soliciting phone calls and visits).
The IMF/WB by linking SAPs to loans for developing tourist industry contribute to the sex trade.
These links are structural, the significance of sex industry rises in the absence of other sources of jobs and revenues.
Compared to the GDP, remittances from expatriates amounted to $ v70.00 billion globally. In the Philippines, a major exporter of women for the sex industry and Bangladesh (which exports mainly men), they are the third largest source of foreign currency.
In South Korea and Philippines, the export program is highly formalized (Bhutto time in Pakistan). The Philippines has ‘Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) to export nurses and maids, and earned$ 1 billion. After the 1973 oil boom Arabs developed a taste for foreign nurses and maids. The US passed the Immigration nursing Relief Act of 1889 (29). Japan, as noted earlier, passed legislation for ‘entertainment workers (30).
Philippines has developed over 500 ‘entertainment brokers’ (31-32) for the Japanese sex market.
The
Philippines has also passed regulations to permit ‘mail-order-bride agencies. The US and Japan are the most frequent destinations for mail-order brides. In the 1980s, the demand for the brides in agricultural communities in Japan, as they had acute shortage of young women and workers in general. As the demand boomed Municipal governments in Japan made it a policy to accept these brides. They served both physical labor and sexual purposes.
Mail-order brides suffer from frequent physical abuse. The US I&NS has reported acute domestic violence against the brides. Again the law discourages the women, as they are liable to be arrested unless they have been married for two tears. In Japan they are not granted full legal status, and they are subject to abuse, not only by their husbands, but also by the extended family.
Philippines is not the only country to promote export of women. After the 1997-98 financial crisis, Thailand started a campaign to promote migration of women, and Sri Lanka has tried to export another 200,000, in addition to the more than a million it already has overseas.